Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Christopher Hampton

First published: 1985

First produced: 1985, at The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, England

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: The 1780’s

Locale: Mansions and châteaus in and around Paris and the Bois de Vincennes

Principal Characters:

• Marquise de Merteuil, a respectable widow
• Madame de Volanges, her cousin
• Cécile de Volanges, the cousin’s fifteen-year-old, convent-educated daughter
• Vicomte de Valmont, the Marquise’s former lover and current partner in intrigue
• Azolan, his valet
• Madame de Rosemonde, Valmont’s eighty-one-year-old aunt
• Madame de Tourvel, Rosemonde’s pious young friend, wife of a presiding judge
• Émilie, a courtesan
• Chevalier Danceny, a twenty-two-year-old knight of Malta in love with Cécile

The Play

The opening dialogue among Marquise de Merteuil, her cousin Madame de Volanges, and her cousin’s daughter Cécile in the marquise’s luxurious salon on a warm August evening establishes the marquise’s spotless reputation and Cécile’s naïveté. With Valmont’s arrival and the Volanges’ departure, the play begins its alternation between the conspiratorial encounters of the two libertines, Valmont and the marquise, and scenes of their reprehensible manipulation of those they victimize.

Scene 1 introduces a double intrigue: The marquise wishes to revenge herself on Gercourt, a former lover who left her for Valmont’s mistress, by having Valmont seduce and debauch Gercourt’s pure fiancé, Cécile; Valmont is intent on seducing an administrator’s virtuous wife, Madame de Tourvel. Although Valmont refuses such easy game as Cécile, and the marquise scorns his seduction of a married woman, the marquise promises to renew their earlier liaison upon seeing written proof of his victory over Madame de Tourvel.

Scene 2 finds Valmont at his aunt’s chateau in the country, with the Volanges and Madame de Tourvel as fellow guests. To benefit from a scene of reform staged with Azolan’s collaboration, Valmont declares himself to Madame de Tourvel, only to be spurned despite her attraction to him; immediately after, scene 3 shows his cynical recourse to Émilie’s bare back, in bed, as a desk for writing Madame de Tourvel a love letter full of witty double entendres.

Ten days later, again conspiring with the marquise, Valmont is eager to seduce Cécile for his own sake, since he now knows that her mother warned Madame de Tourvel against him. Fooling both Danceny, who is in love with and is loved by Cécile, and Madame de Volanges, who rejects Danceny as a suitor for her daughter, into trusting her advice, the marquise arranges for Valmont to become the young couple’s mediator. The upshot comes in scene 6, when, having allowed Valmont to make a copy of the key to her bedroom, Cécile is helpless to denounce him when he forces himself upon her one night.

Meanwhile, thanks to their proximity in Madame de Rosemonde’s home and Valmont’s machinations, Madame de Tourvel’s passion builds to a climactic confrontation in scene 9, during which Valmont insists that she “look” her love for him. Desperate and hysterical from self-restraint, she collapses, but Valmont, uncharacteristically, resists the opportunity to take advantage of her weakness. Act 1 ends with Madame de Rosemonde’s condemnation of men’s incapacity for devotion and her tolerant kindness to her young friend, who flees in the night to escape temptation.

By the opening of act 2, the shared revenge against Madame de Volanges is complete, with Cécile pregnant by Valmont. However, the marquise is not entirely satisfied. Jealous over Valmont’s obvious involvement in his pursuit of Madame de Tourvel, she mocks his slow progress and refuses to tell him the identity of her new lover, revealed to the audience two scenes later as Danceny. In the three scenes in which Valmont hurries to her Paris mansion to report on his interactions with Madame de Tourvel (scenes 12, 14, and 16), she becomes increasingly hostile and scornful.

From scene 11, where Valmont enjoys Madame de Tourvel’s surrender, the play moves rapidly to his humiliation (scene 13) and rejection (scene 15) of this new mistress as a sacrifice to the marquise. It is only in scene 16 that Valmont realizes what the audience has long understood: that the marquise has schemed against him as well as with him and that she has no intention of granting a sexual reward. Having already punished her coldness by encouraging Danceny to leave her for Cécile, Valmont now threatens the marquise, and the two allies declare war on each other.

Subsequently, in a duel in the Bois de Vincennes over Cécile’s honor, Danceny fatally wounds a careless Valmont, hears Valmont’s deathbed warning to beware the marquise, and promises to relay Valmont’s message of undying love to Madame de Tourvel. On New Year’s Eve, Mertueil sits playing cards with Madame de Volanges and Madame de Rosemonde, discussing the death of Madame de Tourvel, Cécile’s withdrawal to a convent, and Danceny’s departure for Malta. The marquise rallies her companions by invoking better days that lie ahead.

Dramatic Devices

The play’s opening and closing scenes mirror each other: Two and three women, respectively, sit playing cards. Through this parallel, Hampton not only preserves the balance that he admires in classical French literature but also emphasizes his protagonists’ view of life itself as a game to win through strategy and trickery. In addition, he divides the play into two acts, each spanning more or less two months and comprising nine scenes. Further dividing these scenes into three units of three, Hampton condenses many of his source’s letters for most of the scenes but ensures that each unit includes “one interlude-like scene (always in second or third position) covering a single event, often in a bedroom, always featuring some kind of single-combat.”

The play’s final moments feature a stage effect that changes the novel’s ultimate punishment of the marquise (through loss of appearance and fortune): After her closing line, “Meanwhile, I suggest our best course is to continue with the game,” the silhouette of the guillotine appears briefly before the lights fade entirely, investing her comment about “look[ing] forward to whatever the nineties may bring” with irony and implying a violent reprisal for her aristocratic decadence. At the same time, this line, coupled with her comment about being “more than halfway through the eighties already,” is also one of the play’s most obvious links to Hampton’s own time and his criticism of the callousness toward the less privileged under British prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s conservative government in the 1980’s.

Interestingly, Hampton’s decision to set all the scenes indoors—triggered by a problem with prop storage at the premiering theater—intensified the social containment and worldly removal from natural rhythms already evident in the novel.

Critical Context

Les Liaisons Dangereuses fits into and represents the peak of Hampton’s career-long passion for classical French literature. Although his first drama, When Did You Last See My Mother? (pr. 1966, pb. 1967), owed something to John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (pr. 1956, pb. 1957), subsequent projects—original plays, translations and adaptations—testified to the paramount influence of French precedents on his work. Notably, in Total Eclipse he explored Rimbaud’s relationship with French poet Paul Verlaine; conceived the comedy of manners The Philanthropist (pr. 1970, pb. 1971) as a response to Molière’s Le Misanthrope (pr. 1666, pb. 1667; The Misanthrope, 1709); and adapted Molière’s Dom Juan: Ou, Le Festin de Pierre (pr. 1665, pb. 1682; Don Juan, 1755) in his Don Juan (pr. 1972, pb. 1974) and Tartuffe: Ou, L’Imposteur (pr. 1664, pb. 1669; English translation, 1732) in his adaptation of the same play (pr. 1983). In Total Eclipse, Hampton signaled his interest in Les Liaisons Dangereuses by having Verlaine compare his marriage to Valmont’s interactions with Cécile.

The world derived from classical French literature that Hampton redesigned for the play clearly relates to his own society as well. Hampton’s epigraph for the play—from French novelist André Malraux—relays a social-conscience message equally appropriate for France in the 1780’s and Tory England in the 1980’s: “As with so many works of our time—not just literary ones—the reader of Liaisons might have said, ’It can’t continue like this.’” In fact, in a 1989 interview, Hampton explicitly connected Laclos’s connivers with the selfish, greedy people in power in modern England—noting, however, that his contemporaries lacked the charm to seduce others into appreciating their vile triumphs. Thus, eighteenth century authenticity combined smoothly with contemporary social criticism.

Although Hampton himself has claimed to see no connection among his plays’ themes and to have “no particular style,” his hallmark seems to be sophisticated analysis of complex, intellectual, and articulate protagonists, whose self-absorption and conflicts he presents with wit and implicit political awareness. Many of these characters are admirably ironic and clever, but their deceit, ruthlessness, and self-absorption ultimately cut them off from their fellow humans.

For his remarkable success in dramatizing events originally relayed in the epistolary form, Hampton received almost unanimously glowing reviews and numerous awards, including the Time Out magazine’s best production award in 1986, the 1986 Olivier Award for best drama, and the 1987 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best foreign play. In 1988, his revision of Les Liaisons Dangereuses for a film directed by countryman Stephen Frears (starring John Malkovich, Glenn Close, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Uma Thurman) won him both the American and the British Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Sources for Further Study

Black, Sebastian. “Makers of Real Shapes: Christopher Hampton and His Story-Tellers.” In Contemporary British Drama, 1970-1990, edited by Hersh Zeifman and Cynthia Zimmerman. Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press, 1993.

Colby, Douglas. As the Curtain Rises: On Contemporary British Drama, 1966-1976. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1978.

DiGaetani, John L. “Christopher Hampton.” In A Search for a Postmodern Theater: Interviews with Contemporary Playwrights, edited by John L. DiGaetani. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991.

Francis, Ben. Christopher Hampton: Dramatic Ironist. Oxford, England: Amber Lane Press, 1996.

Free, William J., and Dale Salwak. Christopher Hampton: An Introduction to His Plays. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1994.

Gross, Robert, ed. Christopher Hampton: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1990.

Kiebuzinska, Christine. “The Narcissist and the Mirror in Les Liaisons Dangereuses: Laclos, Hampton, Muller.” The Comparatist: Journal of the Southern Comparative Literature Association, May, 1993, 81-100.

Wilcher, Robert. “Christopher Hampton: Dramatic Ironist.” Theater Research International 22, no. 2 (Summer, 1997): 175-176.